I came out of the kitchen with water for him and toast for me and saw him gazing at the painting, Mónica’s painting, of ship and sea formed out of the same blue brushstrokes. He was riveted, as though its contents were in motion, unfolding a tale of homecoming or escape. I wondered what had gone through Mónica’s mind as she painted, whether she was thinking of escape or homecoming, the urge to forge a home or flee from one. Remember, hummed the painting, turn me in the light, and the air itself seemed to brandish the shattered partial accounts of my aunt Mónica. Many of them were filtered through the lens of Mamá’s disdain. Though surely Mamá’s own repressed desires helped explain it: all her longing for the brush and palette compressed into that sharp knife of hate. Your sister, she once told Papá, is the only thing about you I despise. A silly woman trapped in Picasso’s blue period, no talent at all, who lived like a whore and shamed her family. Words that stung Papá enough to make him glare at his wife as though he wanted to hit her, a rare response from him, but Mamá showed no trace of surprise and even seemed to hold her chin up as if to say, I not only stand by what I’ve said, I glory in it. It must have been unbearable to her, as a new bride, to watch Mónica painting away in direct defiance of her father and God’s supposed unwillingness to bless her with the gift, and not only painting but hanging her work in little galleries across town. Free, flagrant, terribly shameless. At that time, Mónica lived in a run-down apartment in San Telmo with a girlfriend, and then, everybody knew it, she got involved with politics—that is to say, with the subversives. It was believed that she became part of ERP, that guerrilla group whose acronym always sounded, to my child-ears, like the imitation of a burp.
Of course, it was also possible that she’d joined a different group, not ERP at all, since in that time there were so many factions and so many strains of leftist underground movements; those subversives, Mamá once said, they plagued Argentina like cockroaches in those days, in the early 1970s, you have no idea how bad things got, the violence, the kidnappings, nobody was safe anymore, let me tell you, some people talk badly now against the military but something had to be done. Of course, she didn’t mention the violent right-wing groups, like AAA, whom I learned about much later on my own. Growing up, my sense of the era before the dictatorship was one of utter chaos, of danger around every corner, of young people corrupted by bad people, of wanton violence in the name of revolution. It amazed me that a relative of my father’s—his own sister!—could have become one of those people. It seemed impossible, though of course it wasn’t. She would not have been the only guerrilla to come from such a family.
In any case, from what I could gather, Mónica did not deny the accusations when they were cast her way, though she did not admit to anything, either. She fled to Spain before the generals took over. Rumor had it that she landed in Madrid—how Mamá must have seethed! That woman, that supposed whore, in her own beloved estranged mecca! Twenty-five years now, and we had heard nothing of Mónica, she could be living in Madrid or any other part of Spain or of the planet, or not living at all. She never wrote, never called, and though Mamá always claimed that the family had spurned her, it had always seemed to me that it was Mónica who had spurned us. Mónica, the Girl Who Got Away, Mónica the aperture, the cautionary tale, the exile, the embarrassment, the wild card. She was rarely mentioned by name in our house. I had met her only through photographs older than myself—a serious young woman with a mournful yet defiant stance, even in her first communion dress—and through the single painting of a blue ship that I sometimes caught my father staring at, searchingly, almost expectantly, as though the ship might at any moment turn its course or cast its anchor down in a long-awaited gesture of arrival.
And there it hung now, the ship, neither reaching its destination nor abandoning the attempt. I stared at it as I gave the guest his water. If Mónica could come into this house right now and see who was here, what would she say? Perhaps she’d gape in amazement at this red pool and its contents, or perhaps she’d just want to turn and leave, I left all this for a reason, don’t drag me in, or perhaps she’d sit down and open up her stories of where she’d been and who her brother was and who her father was and after she had emptied herself of all those keys and tales she might ask the impossible question that the ghost had asked and that still hung unanswerable in the air, And you, Perla? Who are you? And I would still have no tenable answer. There would be no words on my tongue, nothing but air.
The ghost devoured his water. He was so grateful (I could tell from the softening of his eyes) for a simple cup of water. He seemed to feel its secret texture, making it crunch and shape-shift between his working jaws.
His pool was already half full. He looked like he was bathing. I brought over the cup and bucket and began to empty it out. I thought, there is no end to his dripping, he will never be dry, for the rest of my life I will scoop and pour this pungent water that possibly contains the liquid essence of the nightmares my guest endured before he died. Who could have imagined it, such memories distilled in pungent water, what does it taste like? If I drank it would I absorb his memories, and if so how could I stand it? I was hypnotized by the pour of it, the gentle rush into the bucket. How easily water returned to itself and took the shape of anything that held it. It was clear and supple; it revealed nothing.
It should have felt like a burden, the edge of madness, this need to kneel beside his pool and remove the water he’d secreted. But it did not. I was too far gone to care about madness and its edges; it seemed to me that I had crossed them long ago and all I wanted was to stay close to this guest forever and not think too much and let his presence filter through me, through the air, this house so full of hieroglyphs and shadows, this house that had been thirsty for so long. It saturated me, woke up my empty spaces and made them roar. I felt dissolved and expanded, all at once. The regular world seemed far away, a strange realm whose language I was steadily losing the ability to speak. I thought of the city out there, full of people, full of rain: students ducked into class with dripping hair, professors closed the windows and noticed or did not notice my absence, taxis skidded dangerously on wet streets, coffee poured into demitasses in cafés crowded with bodies demanding warmth, umbrellas staved the rain away from small, lurching circles of dry space that people make around themselves, marching, purposefully, or pretending to have clarity of purpose. As if everybody knew where they were going and why. The city was an exhausting place, with all its charade of normalcy, its real and invented purpose. Tomorrow I would have to face it—my provisions were starting to get low—but not today. It was no place for a girl who was steadily coming untied, no place for a mind so unmoored.
The doorbell rang and startled me out of the long gauzy tumult of my thoughts. I wasn’t expecting anyone, and there was no one I would open the door to, no one I wanted to see or was willing to let into this world. I decided to ignore it, pretend I wasn’t home, let the person go away of his own accord. The bell rang again. The guest cocked his head and looked at me with wide eyes.
I heard a key turn in the front door.
It was Thursday. Carolina came on Thursdays, to clean the house. She always rang first but she had a key. I ran to the foyer. Carolina had begun to crack the door open, and already her face was crunching with confusion at the smell.
“Hola, Carolina.”
“Perla, what—”
“I’m sorry, I can’t let you in.”
She looked offended. She was my elder. She had been coming into this house for years. “What?”
“It’s not a good time.”
“But I promised your parents—”
“I know, not today. Not until they come back.”
She sniffed the air, as if to corroborate her first reaction. “Perla, what’s going on?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“It smells like something’s rotten.”
“Exactly. It’s my problem, for me to clean up.”
“I could help.”
�
��No.”
“Did you spill something? Take home a beached whale?”
Something in between. I said nothing.
Carolina stared at me as though I’d grown into a strange beast, feral, roaming past the edges of acceptable behavior. She tried another tactic. “Your parents have already paid me.”
“They don’t have to know. I’ll never tell them.”
She folded her arms and stared at me.
“Just take the day off.”
She didn’t move, but she was listening.
“Please.”
“And what shall I tell your parents when they come back?”
That’s when I finally realized, with the alarm of a person waking from a reverie who finally sees the obvious, that they were returning in three days. “Nothing.”
Carolina pursed her lips.
“Everything will be back to normal,” I said, with a confidence I did not remotely feel.
Carolina sighed in surrender, and walked back to the door. I was about to close it when she turned around to face me. “Perlita, what has happened to you?”
I smiled weakly and closed the door.
As I stood listening to her steps down the stone path, the question rang on in my head.
9
El Grito Sagrado
I awoke on the sofa, in the pale early morning. I had fallen asleep downstairs again, but I had not brought down a blanket or pillow because I’d told myself that I was just resting my eyes, that any moment I’d go upstairs to bed, that I was not camping in the living room out of a deep urge to stay close to the guest. Lying to myself, as always. How very many lies.
Darkness pushed up against the bottom of my mind, rising from my rib cage, threatening to expand and consume me. My whole body thrashed and railed against what I knew, what I fought to deny.
You can’t win this.
I can’t let it in.
You have to.
It’ll destroy me.
So will the lies.
A dog barked, outside on the street, a pained and plaintive sound. Outside, the rain had abated, though the sky was still a delicate gray, as if wrapped in thin and somber silk. The rosebushes in the yard glittered in the glory of their dampness, all leaf and thorn, devoid of blossoms. The guest lay in the pool with his eyes closed. He looked peaceful, almost childlike, in his sleep.
I knew then that I couldn’t hide anymore. Not because I didn’t want to, but because there was no room left, no corner dry enough in this house.
I stood up, and to my own surprise my feet were firm and steady. In that moment, I began to say goodbye.
The memory that comes to him begins with beauty, it was a beautiful day: blue skies, loud streets, a victory for Argentina. The World Cup had come to Buenos Aires, it was 1978, the whole world had turned its eyes to them, and they had won. He felt an electric flush of vindication, he couldn’t help himself; he certainly had his skepticism of nationalistic fervor, but still—the world was watching, they stood at the zenith of the world, and even if he balked inside at patriotism in these turbid times he could not deny, could never deny, his great passion for soccer. He had watched the game with his whole body taut, leaning forward from the chair, his legs thrilling with each flex and run and glorious kick. His head felt the thump of the ball, the shouts of the crowd, the hair slick with sweat and wind and motion, as though he himself were on that field writing his nation’s name into the books of history. He cheered and groaned and tensed along with all his fellow countrymen in the stands and also home in front of television sets, like him, separated by walls of plaster and ideas but united, for today, in the throbbing nexus of the game, and when they won his fists shot up, his body leaped, his lungs were bellows pressing out the orgiastic GOOOOL that shook his body and the city and the world, the whole damn amazed circumference of the world, and now, an hour later, the television still roared. The street outside his open window roared as well, rife with sunshine and throngs and blue and white flags, honking cars, radios, chanting, ganaa-mos, ganaa-mos, we won, we won, we won. On the television, more crowds, even thicker crowds, and you could see the wide mouths and the fists high in the air, and General Videla among uniforms, shaking hands with Henry Kissinger, who came thousands of miles to witness the event and salute the Argentinean nation; he was in the stands to see their strength and victory, a not-so-tacit approval of the coup, of course, the U.S.A. all smiles with the generals but by the glow of the World Cup even this fails to disgust him. The cheers from the street erupt in polyphonic splendor and he feels them in this body, he wants to descend, to join them, to merge with these streets that are his streets after all, the people’s streets, streets that can be danced across despite the rumors of these times, he is only waiting for Gloria to arrive, any moment she’ll be home and they will plunge into their fomented city.
Gloria arrives late, her coat flung open, the buttons have long stopped closing around her pregnant belly. She bursts in with coat and hair and eyes loose and wild and she glares at the television as though it were the worst kind of perversion and says, Turn that shit off.
He stares at her from his perch at the small balcony.
Turn it off!
He comes in, turns it off, and tries to calm her with his hands along her shoulders, but she will not be calmed. She wrests from him and paces, a caged animal.
My brother’s gone.
Gone?
He disappeared. Yesterday. He went to work and never came home.
He reaches for something to say, but can find nothing. Outside, the elated voices, We won, we won, we won.
My mother hasn’t stopped weeping, I tried but I could not make her stop.
She looks up. The blankness in her face terrifies him more than her words.
Gloria.
I don’t know what to do.
Could he have been a Montonero?
It is the wrong thing to say; she turns away from him. Should that permit them to do whatever they want with a man?
I didn’t say that.
I don’t know what he was, what he wasn’t.
I’m sorry.
Mamá’s taken out her kerchief, she’s joining the Madres.
He thought of Gloria’s mother out on the Plaza de Mayo, carrying a photograph of Marco. That’s dangerous, he said.
She doesn’t care. She says we should be careful.
Us?
She nods.
We haven’t done anything.
She flares up, bares her teeth. What does that matter? Can you tell me what Marco did?
Of course not.
Can you? Can you?
Gloria, calm down.
She says nothing. A wave of trumpets rises through the window, buoyed by the sound of honking cars, the opening lines of the national anthem played on brass and sung along to by the exultant mob, Oid, mortales, el grito sagrado, libertad, libertad, libertad. Listen, mortals, the sacred cry, freedom, freedom, freedom. He should be thinking of her brother, her hermanito as she still called him even though he towered over her, with his eager lean and stubborn streak and shaggy hair and au courant mustache that belied his age, but he can only think of Gloria’s belly, the baby inside, only three months from bursting out into the world, and his task as protector that has already begun, he must defend the baby (wild creature who kicked against my palm last night) from all dangers, including the danger of a womb receiving panic from the woman it inhabits, the chemical reactions of despair, he wants to calm them, smooth them out, surely all will return to balance if only Gloria will be calm.
Perhaps they’ll release him soon.
God, you’re such an idiot. You still don’t get it.
He can’t stand the distance between them, longs to close it. He says, I’m sorry.
Mamá thinks we should leave.
The country?
Yes.
Is she leaving?
No.
What do you think we should do?
I don’t know. I don’t know. She rubs her w
ide belly and weeps without making a sound.
He wakes. There is no national anthem and no Gloria, only the pool and the room and the girl, who kneels on the floor with a cup of ready water. Her hair is wet, she has bathed, and there is a strange expression on her face, something he hasn’t seen before and can’t identify. She offers him the water, and he leans forward to the cup, eats from it, chews the incandescent liquid and feels it suffuse him, augment him, give him strength. He watches the girl bring the bucket and begin to empty his pool and thinks, Once again you give me life. The thought makes him want to weep, how can this be, that she should give him life, the young to the old or the child to the father or the living to the dead rather than the other way around, it seems to have no logic and yet it’s right and true. He accepts it though his mind could crack under the weight of his gratitude. She is so magnificent, every microscopic hair a revelation, how did all this emerge from Gloria and the seed of him? And also good, she is so good, her kindness with a being as strange as what he has become and the sudden intrusive chaos he has surely created in her life—her kindness has no reason, no sense. Don’t ever succumb to sense, he thinks to her.
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